The year: 1990. The place: Kingston upon Hull, England. The mission: to obtain and chain-watch as much senseless, OTT violence as possible. Hull's secondary-education system has been accused of many failings but, at least in the all-boys' comprehensive I attended, it succeeded spectacularly on one count: breeding in its teenage charges an obsession with any artistic material of an unwholesome nature. That basically meant cheap sex and violence. When pupils weren't combing the nearby wasteground for orphaned porno mags, they were busy talking up whatever horrific VHS spectacle they had most recently procured. Certain scenes – more discussed than viewed – gained mythic status, such as Terminator's auto-eye surgery, or Bruce Campbell chainsawing off his own hand in Evil Dead 2.

Access to such rarefied culture usually came through the trusty older-brother route. Unfortunately for my siblings, I was the older brother, and a very square one too. So it was with uncontainable excitement one Saturday afternoon that I went round to Alan Walters's house to watch something with the promising title of Predator. I knew only three things about it: it was certified 18, it starred the great Arnold Schwarzenegger – the WH Auden of ultraviolence – and it reputedly featured a scene in which someone's eviscerated chest cavity was on full display. Sweet! It didn't disappoint. The bolognaise vista of Jesse Ventura's ribcage was still with me as we stowed away the videotape before Alan's dad got home.

I still love Predator. Wikipedia claims it is a "perennial cable favourite", and it's true: I can't stop myself from watching it whenever it's on, at whatever point I catch it. The ridiculous machismo, the 80s kitsch of the special effects, the panicked second-act spiral as Arnie's crack squad gets picked off, the alien's dreadlocks and crab-platter features – I love it all. I know it's bad for me: no movie with this many future Republican gubernatorial candidates (Arnie, Ventura, as well as Sonny Landham, who was beaten to Kentucky) in it can be healthy. Not to mention a hand-operated Gatling gun. And it's not even the best red-blooded 80s action classic (that would probably be James Cameron's Aliens), or the best vintage-era Arnie flick (The Terminator).

I could

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tell you that I like it because it's a really efficiently directed action thriller, with economical characterisation, stringing together sequences of mayhem to the tight rhythm director
John McTiernan perfected a year later with
Die Hard. But so what? The nearest I can truly nail it is that it's a masterpiece of disposability: just trashy enough to allow you to be ironic about it, but self-believing enough to be credible (unlike most of the rest of Mr Schwarzenegger's 80s oeuvre). It doesn't age, because it never gets above itself: it's an enjoyable mashup of pop-culture leaf-litter, from the
Thing from Another World setup to the Little Richard-soundtracked
wham-bam-Vietnam helicopter opening, to Arnie's final Tarzan-like makeover. They combine with the American genius for abbreviation. This is high-concept movie-making in all its brilliant, blazing stupidity.

Stupid, because it can't help but wear its politics on its veiny biceps. Aged 14, I was too busy admiring Arnie's Arnie-throws-a-grenade face (clue: it's a bit like his Arnie-is-surprised face) to really dwell on this. There's something deeply hypocritical about a film that first establishes that its guerrillas are the evil variety by having one of them cold-bloodedly execute a hostage, then gives its squad of "expendables" free rein to cold-bloodedly murder all of them minutes later. It's the Reagan era all over: tobacco-chewing, tough-talking, US of A military triumphalism on one hand and self-pitying, bugle-salute sentimentalism on the other (when Bill Duke – giving the one thing in Predator that could actually be termed a performance – goes all misty-eyed over his microwaved buddy Ventura).

Most of the big 80s action directors displayed some ambivalence towards the mildly fascistic butt-kicking mores of their chosen form: James Cameron developed his My Little Pony eco side; Paul Verhoeven sharpened his satire. But the full mess and insincerity and dumb contradictions are there unapologetically in Predator, a piece of preening post-Vietnam powder-puff for the US ego. Do I like it because being ironic makes me feel like I know better? Or do I just like it? I don't honestly know.

While we

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're overthinking things, I think Predator has odd moments of self-consciousness too. The one interesting (as opposed to efficient) piece of screenwriting is the scene after they've stormed the rebel encampment, when the alien hunter is watching the soldiers in infrared.
Carl Weathers's CIA agent thanks Duke for skewering a deadly scorpion on his back; Duke's reply – "Any time" – is played back with menacing distortion by the predator, until it sounds like a warning. The radio operator (played by
Lethal Weapon screenwriter
Shane Black) tells a variation of the dirty joke he tried out in the helicopter, also concerning an echo. Landham finally gets it, and his booming laugh is picked up by the alien and played back, grotesquely. Echoes, echoes, and more echoes … until all the machismo is hollow. Something telling is going on here, tonally. The final image of the sequence is the predator watching the heat fade out of the scorpion in its own palm. It's like the film is saying: there's always someone bigger.

There was always someone bigger back at my school. Many of the techniques garnered from the hallowed gore canon were even found to have actual practical application at lunchbreak, though no one ever performed the "death touch" from Bloodsport to complete satisfaction. And Darren Patterson never did follow through on his threats to pluck someone's beating heart from their chest and hold it up in front of their disbelieving eyes, like that bit in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Twenty years on, I can reel off Predator's moves and lines ("I ain't got time to bleed!") without thinking – but watching it takes me back to that overstimulated playground of the imagination, and the basic need that keeps me coming back to the cinema more than any other: just one more glimpse of the raw, the outlandish, the inconceivable.

That fir

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st spurt of 18-certificate films, just as I hit adolescence, was the first big expansion of my cinema universe (the thrill ending after I fake-ID'd my way into
Alien 3 a couple of years later). There have been others since, and I think my tastes in film, as in most things, have matured: I realised
Clockwork Orange was actually a good (not just a banned) film; someone took me on a date to Almodóvar's
Kika (it didn't work out); I fell in love with Beat Takeshi and Wong Kar-wai; my favourite working directors are
Claire Denis and
Andrea Arnold; I spend most of my time these days
writing about life outside Hollywood.

But the fanboy won't die. Arnie is still my favourite film star. I just have to accept it: fundamentally, I have bad taste. I'm a child of the 80s and, to start with, you don't choose your cinema: your cinema chooses you. When that shit-hot military beat kicks in, and then the Governator arm-wrestles Apollo Creed for no discernible plot-based reason, I'm there. Like Weathers says: "You never know how much I missed this!" Schwarzenegger: "You never were that smart."

• This article was amended on 4 November 2011. In the original, Bruce Campbell was called Bill. This has been corrected.